SUNSET FROM THE SURVEYOR'S MARK
An aureole of peeling paint
around a brass nipple
looks, on this cornerstone of headland
like the watching eye of the first man
as God made Eve
careful as you walk on her exposed shoulder
her barren breast
even nature has not marked her here
as my head is marked
acid lichens pitting slow edges
where water has worn hers smooth
careful as you stand
in the arc of her being
watching the night come down
then, as incandescent lights grow on green water
in the small space between darkness and day
there are no eyes
and no edges between.Pat Pillai - June 1999
Pat writes:
I live in the Sutherland Shire, on the Southern outskirts of Sydney, in an area that was badly hit by bushfires in1994. Apart from the human tragedy, the saddest legacy of the fire was the swift demise of our familiar landscape. The "main drag" has been transformed from a street with mainly old fibro houses and simple brick veneers, some of each with dubious handyman renovations, set among gardens and trees that had grown up over the last 25 to 50 years. Nothing that was consciously noticed, until it was suddenly gone. Now we round the bend on new 2 storey concrete mansions, supported by pillars and washed in pastel yellows and greys, with ready made gardens that look perfectly beautiful, but belong in a new estate. A lot of undamaged property is being subdivided under the new urban consolidation legislation, and many homes are simply being rebuilt. I know this is part of a pattern happening to all city suburban landscapes, but the post fire rebuilding has really highlighted that process here.
My end of our suburb contains some pockets of remnant suburbia which I know won't last long. Our street is one of very few not yet curbed and guttered, and is a dead-end (like the difference between a creek and a stream, there is difference between that and a cul de sac, and I prefer the Australian version) and borders on railway and water board land. In that, it reminds me of the estates you talk of, of the disappearing bush and farmland of Mornington now, and of my childhood memories. I lived in a place like that, that no longer exists.
I guess that the constant themes that run through my art and poetry are a blending of the things that happen in my everyday life, and the cycles of nature as I feel them and see them now, in my little sub-urban remnant, and as I carry them with me from my childhood in Slacks Creek, Queensland, an urban fringe that was farmland and bushland, wetland and creeks, that has been taken over by industrial estates to the point where it is unrecognisable. When I went back, I found a piece of parkland somewhere near where our "back water-hole" used to be. I figured that was where it was, because the wetland nature of that area would have made drainage for building expensive, and therefore would have earmarked that section for the legislated necessary green space. There was nothing else left from which I could take bearings, no bends, curves or hillocks, or familiar shaped trees, but since I was visiting in November, and the heat was immense, it was comforting to find that the particular smell that rises from the mixture of lethargy and hot gum leaves was the same.
This is my latest poem, as in today. I like sharing them when they are still raw. I didn't think it had much to do with urban fringes, and remnants, and memory, but on thinking deeper it has. I was standing on a rock in a children's playground near home. It overlooks the river, and will never be built on as it is our green space. It does get refurbished from time to time though. At present it contains children's play equipment in bright colours that clash with it's serenity of place. The rock emerges from a tide of pine bark, keeping the weeds at bay. But there is still native scrub in pockets, framing the view, and the shape of the rocks is a constant in our changing world.
(C) Pat Pillai - June 1999
Back to Suburban Margins
